“We are going to start impounding any vehicle that has expired or substandard tyre” – FRSC Boss, Boboye Oyeyemi

The Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) on Monday said it would hence forth impound vehicles with expired and substandard tyres in the country.

The FRSC Corps Marshal, Boboye Oyeyemi, made this known at the Stakeholders’ Forum on Tyres with the theme “Promoting Safe Tyre use in Nigeria”.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the forum was organised by the FRSC in Abuja.

Oyeyemi said that all the crashes the commission had recorded from February 2016 till date had been tyre-related.

He said that this could be attributed to the ignorance in the use and management of tyres by most drivers.

We are going to start impounding any vehicle that has expired or substandard tyre, and then we will arrange for the continuous journey of the passengers. That’s the new method to preserve lives. This is going to be done without fine but the driver will use money to go and buy genuine tyres with receipt before he would be allowed to continue his journey.

Enough is enough to this. We need to take stringent actions as soon as possible to save more lives. Nigerians will have to choose between life and death. It’s either you use a fake or substandard tyre, and then with the temperature of 41 degrees have a tyre blow out and a life is lost, or you buy a genuine tyre and play safe.

New tyres are not so costly: with N11, 000 now you can get a new tyre, whereas these fairly used tyres cost between N5, 000 and N6, 000: the choice is yours.

Oyeyemi urged Nigerians not to put their lives at risk and consider the fact that life has no replacement and could not be bought with money.

“You can buy tyres, vehicles can be replaced but lives can’t be replaced. The choice is yours, but on our part, we have decided that no vehicle can move forward with substandard tyre,” he said.

He said that the support of the government and the private sector was needed in order for Nigeria to go back to having tyre plants.

He said that the control of tyres coming into the country was made difficult as there were no longer tyre manufacturing companies in the country.

Oyeyemi said that there was, therefore, the need to encourage local production of tyres.

He appealed to the Manufacturing Association of Nigeria (MAN) and the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA), to explore how tyre manufacturing plants could be brought back to life.

He said that the FRSC has been raising alarm on fake tyres since the Dunlop and Michelin tyre plants were shut down in Nigeria.

This, he said, had led to people patronising bad tyres which in turn increased the rate of road crashes.

He said this was because of ignorance of drivers and non compliance with instructions on tyre.

Oyeyemi said many of the local vulcanizers use improperly calibrated measuring tools while some lack knowledge on the accurate gauge of each tyre.